Many organizations operate wide area networks to provide access to applications and data. But sometimes these WANs are not capable of providing access at speeds that users want or need. That can result in problems such as decreased productivity and customer service degradation.
To deal with this challenge, a growing number of businesses are turning to WAN acceleration technologies. These products are designed to speed up applications and protocols running over a WAN. They use techniques such as low-level compression and protocol optimization to provide acceleration.
With WAN acceleration, organizations can not only boost the speed of end-user access to applications, but also get the most out of their existing network bandwidth and improve disaster recovery operations, among other benefits.
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“The market is definitely still growing and we haven’t seen a slowdown in end-user demand for WAN acceleration,” says Robert Whiteley, principal analyst, Network Performance and Security, at Forrester Research. “ In fact, as IT [managers] look to trim the fat from budgets, they often turn to consolidation projects, which in turn increase the need for WAN optimization to accelerate connections to centralized data center resources.”
Whiteley says many of the benefits of WAN optimization are hard to quantify, but include increased productivity, improved performance of revenue-generating applications, and streamlined disaster recovery via accelerated remote backups and data replication.
“Most companies list these as key drivers, but the business case rests on good old bandwidth savings,” Whiteley says. For example, WAN optimization can decrease link utilization from 80 percent to 40 percent through the use of caching and compression. “This often prolongs a major WAN bandwidth upgrade,” he says. “We’ve seen clients with highly latent international links see a return on investment [in] as short as three months. If you have a regional or nationwide network, you can expect a tamer 12- to 18-month ROI.”
The primary challenges of deploying WAN acceleration have to do with lack of due diligence in technology selection, Whiteley says. “Companies often fall in love with acceleration benefits, but when they go to scale the deployment [either adding more traffic or more sites], they hit barriers,” he says.
It’s critical that enterprises select WAN acceleration with proper scalability, including support of the right throughput, number of TCP sessions, disk capacity and number of sites, Whiteley says. They also need to make sure the technology is reliable, in terms of hardware and software modularity, redundancy and failover. In addition, the technology must be transparent to users. That includes deploying WAN acceleration with the appropriate layer in the network topology.
“Typically, we see that companies will still realize the key benefits if they don’t take these challenges into account, but it can often hamstring the potential gains,” Whiteley says. “Also, in some cases, companies will spend extra cycles on the IT operations side to address an issue.”
